About the role
We're transforming the grocery industry At Instacart, we invite the world to share love through food because we believe everyone should have access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together. Where others see a simple need for grocery delivery, we see exciting complexity and endless opportunity to serve the varied needs of our community. We work to deliver an essential service that customers rely on to get their groceries and household goods, while also offering safe and flexible earnings opportunities to Instacart Personal Shoppers. Instacart has become a lifeline for millions of people, and we’re building
the team to help push our shopping cart forward. If you’re ready to do the best work of your life, come join our table. Instacart is a Flex First team There’s no one-size fits all approach to how we do our best work. Our employees have the flexibility to choose where they do their best work—whether it’s from home, an office, or your favorite coffee shop—while staying connected and building community through regular in-person events. Learn more about our flexible approach to where we work. Overview Instacart’s Fraud, Appeasement & Identity (FAI) team protects the marketplace and everyone who depends on it—customers, shoppers, retailers, and brand partners. We build the systems that detect and prevent fraud across payments, accounts, and promotions; ensure that refunds and appeasements are fair, accurate, and resistant to abuse; and verify identity so that every transaction can be trusted. Our mission is to safeguard revenue and customer trust while keeping friction low, so the business can scale with confidence. We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer to serve as a technical leader across FAI. In this role, you’ll define the technical strategy and architecture for critical trust surfaces real-time fraud detection, risk decisioning, appeasement and refund-abuse controls, and identity and account-verification workflows. You’ll partner closely with Product, Data Science and ML, Design, Fraud Operations, Legal, and external identity and risk vendors to deliver fast, safe, and scalable solutions. This is a high-impact role where your work directly influences fraud losses, customer trust, marketplace integrity, and our ability to scale sustainably while meeting regulatory and privacy standards. If you thrive in fast-moving, highly cross-functional environments and enjoy rolling up your sleeves to solve adversarial problems at scale, you’ll feel right at home here. We go far together, communicate with candor, and prioritize solutions where everyone can win. About the Job Design, build, and operate significant components of FAI systems end to end—fraud detection, risk decisioning, appeasement/refund-abuse controls, and identity verification— delivering reliable, safe features as the platform scales to millions of customers and shoppers. Contribute to the design of real-time and near-real-time risk decisioning systems that balance detection quality with customer experience, minimizing both fraud losses and false positives on good users. Deliver business-critical trust initiatives (e.g., account-takeover prevention, payment and promo-abuse defense, appeasement-abuse controls, identity and eligibility verification), building auditable, privacy-first systems with strong observability and SLAs Partner with Data Science and ML to productionize fraud and risk models—owning feature pipelines, model-serving infrastructure, and the feedback loops that keep detection effective against evolving adversaries. Run large, cross-functional programs across multiple engineering and business teams; translate ambiguous, adversarial problem spaces into crisp technical plans, manage risk and dependencies, and unblock execution. Mentor and develop engineers through design reviews, high-quality code practices, and clear technical standards; raise the technical bar and cultivate the next generation of technical leaders on
